Who sees a wall and wants to climb it?
Who meets a wall and goes around?
One eyes the bricks and speculates,
another feels the fence for hidden gates.

Among the clouds I'm ringed by solid blue,
enclosed by depth as well as by stone,
free in the vapor city to become my form,
fierce in the rage of rain to blow my storm.

She halts her walk at the wall's kindness,
the path grown long for her burdened bones.
she leans on the rocks where the plush brown
moss makes comfort and the grass peeks through.

Cloud castles march in the brick blue skies.
Dreams of rain reflect in her sky-bound eyes.

Let our untied tongues heal these young
fears of yours, as our love drills its path
across our countries, bridging the river between.

We can fill our ears with medicine love
when touch is too true to be remembered
and you feel like thought opens old wounds.

We found our bridge in the darkness
and love met us there as a dark owl.
It shall remain within always to join us.

We are able without trespass to share lands.
Though now you feel me like a guest,
I am as native in your life as my own.

Let our common tongue unravel the messages
love's dark owl utters by the steadfast bridge.

XXX.

She's lived longer yarns than the ghost-tale wags,
than the earth-myth sleeps or the cowbell brags.
I miss out on the stream's green rush,
on the berries' bright and the fern-leaves' crush,

while she takes flight like the mist takes form
to squeeze its grit with a forceless storm.

I can't call trouble til she cracks her news,
til she shines her faith on our changes' bruise,
til she speaks my name like she can't let loose,
but must allow us our love's stark truth.

In my calm shell the surf-beat roars.
My rocks go slack where she tracks my shores.
I cup to her ears my restless tide
and she sets the shell by her warm bedside.

XXXI.

I would still the doubts out of her wing's white sleeves,
fill the fool's goblet with the hills' red wine,
measure the full grace her treasure remembers
and suspend the wind like iron clouds between peaks.

I would slay demons and kill hells to save her faith from dread,
hollow the awful thunder of the law's cruel will,
crush the suffering shadows and crush the idol's clay
and exalt the honest freedom of survival's requiring.

I would spend her days on the jewels of my time's own dreaming,
spend the jewels on the dreams of our love's desiring,
bury tomorrow's questions in the deep earth of our answering,
answer her prayers and pray in the light of the stars' falling.

I would live like the storm-god's child in her sacred grove,
focusing all my force to a tender whisper through the pines.

XXXII.

Our lives sling back the swift letters
we tossed like trophies to the sun,
seeing our hearts burst in bright tatters
and swelling our eyes with arms gone.

You rake my studies with your sharper beam,
no joke. You know I choose blind
because only willing fills the unforeseen
and my wish spares our torn time.

Your sweet fears flatter my free worth,
your doubts trigger my stubborn faith.
Your love returns to your need's best source:
my desire to heal your chains' distress.

In another book I would have sooner disappeared.
In your story my love grows grey in the beard.

XXXIII.

She'll be in all my sad songs of doomed love,
in all my repressed stoic hazard's fences,
coiled up like fetal roses, posed to bloom.

I'll ride out again to the hills on my senses
tuned in on color's harmony, fugue's perfume,
singing all my doomed songs of perfect love.

The spirit of our final nights like potent vapors
shall without lust haunt me with her kisses,
her little warm hands slipping under my shirt.

My need's fear, redeemed in her full moon blush,
secrets buried in the pages of street papers,
sinks staining then fading into our thirsty dirt.

In all my sad doomed songs her ghost wind hisses
til silence bears my aching home in mourning hush.

XXXIV.

My poor girl has her best reckoned tough now.
The terrors of the fast town strafe the boulevard.
She's plunging her stuff in the gaudy crowd;
hang on, love, til this first curse turns hard.

She'll read in her path steps dreamt to me
and crush the crass rush with my memory.

I'm here where the heights are the lowliest fish
and the tanks ripple slowly in trifling winds.
There the lights tower for the frivolous wish
and the edifice feeds on the suckers' cheap sins.

My poor girl can't scream in the earless commotion
nor hold herself quiet to its corrupted face.
She'll sail her pure dreams on need's desperate ocean
whose waves rake like beaches my bay's embrace.

XXXV.

She's nailed her arrows above my wounded door,
an act of peace my shields regard with hammered bronze.
My borders dim where her sheltered eyes go poor
as within the stubborn citadel she shelves her wielded bonds.

Warriors fence their shadows, break their swords against the walls;
the trouble seeps like scolding birds within.
The door holds tight though it stands unlocked where the stonework falls
and the weaponless few with their faith slip in.

Like a scribe in a robed and curtained cell
I write the halls of her search and the rooms of her discovery.
In trembling runes she reads the spell
that seals the secret map and finds the course to my recovery.

Above our nation's arms, from the battlements we look
on generations risen from the bones of the beautiful book.

XXXVI.

The angry sun's split to the Humbolt Hills;
it's a day without light and no way to look.
In my room the bulb scorn thwarts my skills
and I'm egged by the unpenned words of my book.

The lubricants can't spin the wheels.
This morning a dry bearing squeals

as I roll my wagon up to the empty page.
The load wavers and the mules whine.
The sun just hates my old rickety stage,
with its home-made traces and soft design.

Well, I have the cloud's dark arms and breast,
caress of doubt and winter's trust.
Let the sun beat streets to dust!
My shadows and I will fake this test.

XXXVII.

We pause in each measure for the flight of the beacon dove.
Scene in the bath where the first maiden robes her shoulders:
They flex in the moment. They sway as the cracked window
sheds light, shafts shadow through the flesh of the parlour.

We speak in deep tones. She stabs the heart of the candle.
Like flutes through moonlit snow she sends her clean skin
to me, a portrait on the wall with set eyes and proud teeth.
We blink in the still sequence, die in the fragrant temple.

I stop where an ignorant fence divides a naked plain,
drive my pony away for solitude to feel the sudden vision.
At the end of my sight a crumbling palace strokes a blue hill.

She is the warm breath of a memory there, the wake
of a swan on smooth water, the surface of darkness.
A window glimmers. A bird leaps into the vacant sky.

XXXVIII.

1.
What I need exactly is you seeing me.
You asked me not to look into you that way.
You guard your mystery, but I thought
you would also need its frank discovery.

You need to see how the source induces
every me I become when we meet again.
Who I am loves you though what you
watch is action and the lover's value to
your phase's daily temper, your dream's reflex.

What I need exactly is no matter what fits
your feelings you feel this am who strides
all the faces of myself without contradiction.
Our souls remember thoroughly; you must
reveal me what it is I need exactly.

2.
She barely sees the poet, needing the man.
In her lonely hours she dreams without seeing
the kind of touch she needs and I arrive
with no notion of her winter envisioning.

But below the poet lies a prophet and he
is a radical philosopher whose very thoughts
can wager history, odds against the world.

That world sees the priest like a clown
reciting the honky-tonk scriptures. She sees
the poet who lies beneath that surface.

Layers like the strata of earth to the core
and she sees only the man who sees barely
how to hold her in time to make love like a bridge,
how to need exactly who this day she is.

3.
I'm a man without eyes for the colors she drives,
the light she's powering. New senses sprout
naively blundering among her feminine rules.

Our twin souls hungered for our skin's belief,
trapped at the mind's test, stranded in the shadows
(Should I hear this color or taste this tune?)
and we pried down the walls to let our love drain loose.

Here in our need's reflection we stand our flesh
to match the wish's shape with the being substance.
(So how's your eye to speak the heat we both miss
and my ear to feel the voice of your best fire?)

Bring out the mission the first breath wants
and show her the core's central theory, the faith's
idea from which each face of Adam needs exactly.